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Sneznhnaya is fucking cold.
Not in a Dragonspine wow my toes kinda tingle kind of way; it’s the bitter-fucking permafrost that sinks deep into your bones and numbs every fiber of one’s being, kind of cold. Kaeya’s teeth don’t just chatter, they suffer the risk of cracking right in half with how much they shake.
The layers aren’t enough, even though he’s swaddled in musty, dusty wolf fur.
Childe grins at him, amused. “What’s wrong? Can’t handle the cold?”
Using his own damn words against him. Childe would, that insufferable smirk spread wide across his face.
If Kaeya could feel his fingers, he’d pelt him with a snowball. Kaeya cannot feel his fingers, so they stay jammed into the pockets of the thick fur coat he’d borrowed from Childe’s brother instead.
“What’s with that look?”
“Oh, just thinking about how I’m going to murder you later.”
Childe trips on a gnarled tree root, barely catching himself. “In bed?” he asks, his tone hopeful.
Kaeya doesn’t answer, letting him wonder. Childe opens his mouth for a quick retort, but Kaeya beats him to it. “Pretty sure that my eyelashes are going to freeze off.”
“Freeze, sure. When the ice clings to them, that’s when you know it’s a bright, warm Senznayan day.” Kaeya grunts at that. Childe hangs back, slowing his step. He bumps their shoulders together. “Hey, if you’re truly that miserable, we can head back.”
“No, I—” Kaeya pauses. “I’m not one to waste opportunities, you know that. Imagine the information that I can glean.”
Childe looks amused, his brow crinkling slightly. “Kaeya, there’s nothing of value in Morepesok.”
“There is always something of value, for a man like myself. I’m never off-duty.”
“I mean, this is meant to be a vacation, so—”
“And it is.” Kaeya waves vaguely, his fingertips nearly purple in the arctic air. “I just chose to work through it.”
Childe laughs, quiet and understanding. There isn’t a man in Teyvat who doesn’t grasp the concept of always working, more than he. He’s also very adept at always watching his back, and trusting literally no one.
They’ve both been failing more and more on that last one, not they either would complain. Kaeya has rather enjoyed the soft and quiet turn that his life has taken, as of late. And he knows that Childe does too. They are truly two sides of the same sort of coin.
“Onward march, then?” Childe motions into the great, snowy beyond. The sky is a dark gray, and snow flurries flutter around. There are more dead trees than not, and the only animal he’s heard is the distant cry of a wolf somewhere behind them.
Childe looks at ease, though, perfectly comfortable.
Kaeya finds that he drifts right towards him.
❄❄❄
“A vacation,” said Childe one sunny, and warm-lit afternoon. “I’m headed back home to my family and I thought maybe you’d like to come.”
He asked it casually, but nervousness flooded his figure. He didn’t look Kaeya in the face, instead, worrying his glance against the table at The Good Hunter as he ran his fingers along the harsh grain.
Kaeya shoved his dumplings into his mouth to give himself more time to answer.
There wasn’t a doubt— they are together. Like, together, together; hopelessly intertwined, unable to look past what’s stretched between them. Childe started with a fight, Kaeya responded with a fuck, and they both stayed for the unexpected warmth they found nestled in the warm body of the other.
Kaeya doesn’t date. Childe doesn’t date either, but they’d persisted on with each other for an annoyingly long time.
“Yes,” said Kaeya, for once letting his heart answer instead of his brain. He told himself it would be the perfect opportunity to stake out a rare place he’d never visited.
But when Childe smiled back at him, wide and genuine, freckles toasted in the mid-afternoon sun—
Kaeya knew it was a lie.
❄❄❄
He is not prepared to see what Childe is like with his family.
Kaeya knows that Childe can be warm and affectionate— he knows this intimately and thoroughly. But when Childe is in his home and surrounded by true, familial warmth, he’s almost a different person.
It’s like he’s intruding. Kaeya stands in the far corner of the wooden cabin. The place is too small for such a large family, too fucking humble. But it breeds warmth inside, both from the fire and the general disposition.
Family is a bit of a foreign concept to him; whomever he had isn’t around anymore. Diluc certainly doesn’t talk to him, even though he still cares in his own way. But even when they were young and close—
Childe lifts Teucer and settles him against his hip, arms wrapped around the boy’s waist. He whispers into Teucer’s ear, flashing that rapscallion grin, and they both laugh devilishly. Thinking up a plot, most likely, one that is sure to entertain for the rest of the night.
Auburn hair glows in the firelight, as Childe laughs. Teucer tugs at his shirt. Tonia tugs at his trousers. Everyone vies for his attention, and Childe does his best to split it. He loves it though, being back home like this.
“Hey, what’re you doing over there?” Childe looks at him with the sort of affection that authors write about. “No need to spy from the corner.”
Teucer runs over to him and pulls at his hand, dragging Kaeya to the middle of the room. Jokes are shared, food is eaten, drink glasses are clinked against each other as Childe’s father slaps him against the back.
And Childe watches him, his gaze never leaving, happiness practically leaking from his pores.
Kaeya realizes that he isn’t different; this is just what Childe is really like when he isn’t wearing the mask of a Harbinger, or bending the knee before an Archon. Everything that Kaeya thought he knew, that he thought he’d figured out, crumbles into dust before his feet. Childe has always been good at presenting himself just how he wants to be seen by others; a quality that Kaeya rather likes for himself, as well. There’s always been a little push and pull of that, between the two of them, taunting teases and words, and the wonder of what’s really true.
But here, Childe laughs loudly and ruffles the hair of his siblings. He yells boisterous quips and sings drinking songs whilst downing shots of brain-tingling firewater. Childe looks so at ease, so fucking genuine, so alive. Those dull, dead depths of his eyes seem to glitter here.
Kaeya feels his heart tilt, pitter-pattering in a way that it doesn’t often do, even when they're fucking each other into oblivion.
Childe has shown him this willingly. Childe has bared who he truly is, expecting nothing in return.
If anything, Kaeya feels honored.
❄❄❄
If the afternoon was cold, the evening is worse. Childe drags Kaeya out into the thick of the snow for a quiet moment away from his family.
“Sorry,” he says, scratching at his neck sheepishly, “They can get a little rowdy, and sometimes I just need to slip for a bit.”
Kaeya can imagine. It’s clearly a party whenever Childe comes back home.
They walk. They walk and walk and walk, always in one direction, close enough for their shoulders to touch, even though neither can feel it through the thick down of their coats.
“It’s nice,” says Kaeya.
“Yeah.” Childe is quiet. “It’s— well, it’s better than it was.”
“Then it was?” Childe talks about his siblings, but he doesn’t talk about the family unit as a whole. Kaeya has always assumed that it was for safety’s sake, not for any other reason.
“I know it doesn’t look like it, but things with my parents are a bit strained. But it’s getting better. And, of course, we put on a show for the kiddos.”
Perhaps Childe and Kaeya understand each other a little more than he originally thought. He doesn’t expand on the thought though, he just lets it sit there, weighing heavy in the air as they keep on.
Eventually, Childe comes to a stop. There is a large boulder, and a tree with a large mark carved into it. Fresh snow covers the ground and wolves are keening in the distance. There is a look that falls over Childe’s face that Kaeya has never seen— something akin to fear.
“Hey, are you alright?”
“Just— sorry, thinking about something.” A pause. “There’s a hole. In the ground around here. I fell into it as a kid.”
“Rough,” says Kaeya with a chuckle.
Childe doesn’t chuckle.
“Childe—”
“You know how when you’re a kid, you pretty much feel invincible? Like, even in the worst of situations, nothing phases you?”
Kaeya does, and he tells him just that.
“It’s funny how the older you get, the easier it is to realize how dumb you were. I fell into a hole as a kid, and I came out as a man, but I was still too fucking young, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I just beat other kids bloody instead.”
“And look at where that has gotten you? You’re a Harbinger, you’re a Vanguard—”
Childe smiles at him bitterly, that cold, dead gaze back. “My family is terrified of me.”
Kaeya has never pitied Childe, but he does at that moment. A hole, he thinks.
He wonders just what was at the bottom of it.
❄❄❄
Childe gasps underneath him, hiding his mouth in the crook of his elbow to cut off a moan.
He looks so delicious, so delectable below him. Kaeya drags his fingers down his sides, nails digging into the meat of his waist. Childe is tight around him, as he always is, and it’s a fucking shame that it’s too dark in the room to see just how his hole looks, rim spread wide around his dick.
But he can imagine. He can feel it. Kaeya’s hand shifts as he drags it lower, thumbing around the slick edge, feeling just how well he slides in and out of Childe with every thrust of his cock.
“You’re too loud,” he says, though he loves it. Childe chokes off a moan, his voice croaked. “What would the others think? Us, fucking in your childhood bed—”
“Gods—”
“Hm? Shut up?” That’s usually how this goes; Childe begging for him to keep his mouth shut as he fucks him good.
“No, no— don’t stop.”
Kaeya couldn’t stop this if the world depended on it. The heat and friction are just too good around his cock. He wants Childe to slip more and more, to tumble completely and come over and over.
“You feel amazing,” says Kaeya, wondrously. His hands roam Childe’s skin again, his fingers flicking over his scars. So many, so so many— and what a beautiful pattern he knows that they make across Childe’s skin. “So fucking tight. Perfect for me.”
“More,” begs Childe, his fingers curled against his back, nails biting into the skin there. Kaeya moans, fucking into him harder, but— “No,” says Childe, “No, not— please.” Childe’s arms shift, wrapping around his neck, tugging him closer.
Kaeya’s hips falter as their chests fall flush. Childe presses their foreheads together, one of his hands combing through Kaeya’s hair, yanking at it tightly. Kaeya’s scalp burns, and his cock twitches, but mostly—
“Childe,” he breathes against his neck, biting at the nape of it, his teeth sinking in. He sucks a mark there, something dark and bruising, something that will last so he can stare at it for days.
“Ajax.” Kaeya is confused. He pulls back to look at Childe, suddenly still against him. Childe looks panicked for a moment, like he didn’t mean to say it. Kaeya is still balls deep when Childe swallows thickly beneath him. “My— It’s my name,” he says quietly.
“Ajax,” repeats Kaeya softly. Childe gasps, a breathy sort of thing, his eyes wide and vulnerable. “Ajax,” he says again, his hand splayed wide across his stomach, feeling the muscles there. Such a deadly man, entirely at his mercy.
Childe doesn’t make love; he fucks like it’s a fight. It’s usually a biting and rough sort of thing, which is exactly what Kaeya craves. This is different. This is tender and warm, and Childe seems so exposed.
Things between them have shifted again— but it’s clear that it happened long ago when neither of them was looking.
Kaeya rolls his hips again, thrusting in deep and languid. Childe scrabbles against him, raising his thighs, wrapping his legs around the rise of Kaeya’s hips. Kaeya leans into him again, grasping at his hips, changing the angle—
Childe yelps; the sort of yelp that tells him that’s the right spot, the perfect spot. Kaeya fucks into him with easy, measured thrusts, over and over again. It’s somehow overwhelming. It’s more fevered than the raw fucking he’s so used to.
“Kaeya,” murmurs Childe, his head tipping back as he bares his neck. “Archons— fuck, fuck—”
He probably loves him, he thinks. Kaeya would say that he’s unsure because he’s never really loved a person before. But Childe permeates his entire being. He’s steeped deep into his heart and Kaeya doesn’t think he’ll ever be the same.
Kaeya comes first, fucking into the addicting tight heat of Childe’s ass. Childe holds him close and whispers into his ear, strange little promises and the sort of soft words that aren’t usually reserved for him.
Childe must love him too, otherwise, why would he act like this? Kaeya thought his instincts would fight it, ever on the offensive as he slyly watches others. They don’t. They welcome the feelings and Kaeya trips deeper and deeper, falling into it.
He pulls his cock out gingerly, thumbing at Childe’s loosened hole, feeling his spend trickle out. Childe is still hard, gasping underneath him, bucking into his hold as his cock bobs against his stomach.
Kaeya wants. Oh, Kaeya wants— Not just his dick in his mouth, but everything that Childe seems to willingly offer. He murmurs his name again, sliding down his front. Kaeya treats him with care as he kisses across Childe’s skin, and smoothes his thumbs across his hipbones.
It’s easy to lose himself entirely.
He never wants this to end.
❄❄❄
“It’s an aurora,” says Childe to him, several nights later.
It’s even colder— something that Kaeya would never have thought possible.
“Some might find this romantic.”
Childe gives him a cheeky look. “Would that be a bad thing?”
Kaeya is thrown off-kilter by both the casualness of the statement, and how much he craves it. He and Childe share moments alone in bed, but so rarely do they get a chance like this. They never get to share something soft underneath the dark and starry sky.
The colors of the aurora wriggle and warp the night. Kaeya finds that he can’t stop staring at Childe. His cheeks are rosy in the cold, his nose drips just slightly and snowflakes cling to his eyelashes.
Once they arrive in Mondstadt, things will likely go back. Not entirely— they’ve crossed a threshold of some sort. But Childe has duties, and Kaeya has his own. They’ll pretend that their outings are for spying when they’re really just a guise to bask in each other’s presence.
Here, though, there are no wandering eyes. Here, Kaeya can reach out and grasp Childe’s palm and curl his fingers around his hand. Childe squeezes back, refusing to let go. It’d be better without the gloves, of course, but Kaeya refuses to risk frostbite.
Childe smiles at him warmly.
And, for this moment, Kaeya relishes it.